Bottom posting v top posting

[Akkana Peck]

Brian Salter-Duke writes:
> My partner reads gmail on her phone or tablet. [ ... ]
> If I had bottom posting, she would never have read my message, thinking
> that some how she had got her email back again.

If that's true, you're not trimming enough. The idea isn't to quote
the other person's entire message and put your reply underneath --
that's annoying on any platform, not just on phones. The idea is to
quote a few lines of context before your reply, and remove the rest.
If someone wants to read the entire previous message, they can use
the list archive.

In a later message, Brian Salter-Duke writes (after 32 lines of
two levels of unedited quoted material):
> We have had 20 years or so to educate people to bottom post. We have almost
> entirely failed.

That failed because a few companies that provided the email software
for a high proportion of users, notably Google and Microsoft,
opted to configure their mail software to add a blank line at the
top of the message, thus implying people should put their reply there.
Users took the hint, and that was when everybody started switching
to top-posting. It wasn't nearly as common before the Gmail default
changed; I think Outlook's default had changed quite a bit earlier,
and corporate users had been top-posting for quite a while, but it
wasn't that common for ordinary users or mailing lists until Gmail
changed.

If everybody used mutt, the top-posting scourge wouldn't have
happened. :-)

        ...Akkana